There’s a stack of books on the floor beside my nightstand. And there’s another stack next to it. And there’s a third stack on the nightstand above. It’s a bit ridiculous and it’s about time I did my twice-yearly movement of books to my overflowing bookshelves downstairs.
Before I do that, though, I thought I’d give you a list of the books (in no particular order) from the past six months or so that I’d recommend for your reading pleasure and personal growth. (This is just the non-fiction list – I have a whole other stack of fiction books.)
(Full disclosure: The links below are affiliate links on Amazon. I hope you consider buying the books from local booksellers, but if you’re going to buy them from Amazon, you might as well use the links so that I get a few pennies to get some more books for free.)
1. The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay It sounds a little obvious to say so, but this is a delightful book. It’s a collection of short reflections of things that Ross Gay, a poet, finds delightful in the world. It’s not all kittens and roses, though… through his capacity for witnessing delight he also shares some hard things about what it’s like to be a Black man in the U.S.
2.Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, by Emily and Amelia Nagoski This book could NOT have come at a better time for me – just as I was slipping into my own burnout after an incredibly challenging year of building a new business, starting a partnership, and dealing with my daughter’s scary and rare health conditions in the middle of a global pandemic. What I especially appreciate about it is that Emily and Amelia (twin sisters) have a finely tuned lens for understanding and explaining how much women’s burnout is a factor of the culture we live in and how “the system is rigged against us”. They don’t just give the analysis though – they provide helpful tools and resources.
3.I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey, by Izzeldin Abuelaish If you want to learn more about the harsh reality of what it’s like to live in the Gaza Strip, then this book is worth the read. It’s a revealing and heartwrenching memoir written by a doctor who’s spent most of his life there. Shortly after his wife died, a bomb hit his home and killed three of his daughters and a niece. Despite his many hardships and the cruelties done to his family, he has a surprising capacity for grace and forgiveness.
4.Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson This is my most-referenced book of the last year. I have recommended it to dozens of people and will continue to do so because it’s a book that changed me. It’s definitely confronting at times (it makes you look more closely at your deeply held beliefs and biases and why you’re hanging onto them), but it also helps to explain the world and relationships and why we often end up in the conflicts that we do. I understand myself better and have more compassion for people who struggle with giving up ideas and beliefs that are important to them and that become part of their identity.
5.The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, by Sarah Lewis One of my favourite things about this book is the way it embraces and elevates the gift of failure. If you’ve been struggling with your inner perfectionist, and you often don’t get things done because of the way it blocks you, this might be the right book for you.
6.Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, by Soraya Chemaly I picked up this book because anger is one of my most uncomfortable emotions and I don’t always know how to process it or channel it. I wasn’t disappointed. Chemaly teaches how anger can be a vital instrument and catalyst for change when we approach it with conscious intention.
7.The Body is Not an Apology, by Sonya Renee Taylor I can hardly recommend this book strongly enough. I listened to it first as an audiobook, but when I finished, it felt so important to me that I needed to own a physical copy. If you want to examine your own relationship with your body and dig deeply into the cultural and systemic messages you’ve been picking up about your body all of your life, then you won’t find a better book than this one.
8.Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Adam Grant This is a valuable book for exploring the ways that we get stuck in our thinking and how we can become more expansive and open to new ideas. It’s about unlearning and relearning, with courage and humility, so that we can keep growing and stretching ourselves.
9.Broken Horses: A Memoir, by Brandi Carlile If you love Brandi Carlile’s music, as I do, then you’ll love this book. It’s the story of her life growing up in a musically gifted but impoverished and fractured family. It’s also the story of how she found her way into her musical career and how she developed the confidence and courage to live life on her terms and to become the star she is now. (My sister tells me that it’s even better in audio because not only does Brandi read it, but she also sings a song at the end of each chapter.)
10.Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, by Ijeoma Oluo I was looking forward to this book coming out because I really appreciated Oluo’s last book, So You Want to Talk About Race. This is a bold exposé of white male supremacy. It digs deeply into the history of the U.S. and reveals what happens when, generation after generation, white men are told they deserve power.
11.Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life, by Jill Bolte Taylor I was fascinated with Jill Bolte Taylor’s first book, My Stroke of Insight, and was pretty confident this would be a good follow-up. In it, Taylor explores how the brain has four “characters” and she lays out how we can learn to live more balanced, peaceful, holistic lives when we grow our capacity for tapping into each part of the brain and processing information, situations, and decisions with all four parts engaged. I’m curious enough about what I learned in this book that I’d love to someday take a workshop with Taylor to dig deeper into how this might inform my own work. I think there are some beautiful lines of connection between whole brain living and holding space.
12.Discovering the Inner Mother: A Guide to Healing the Mother Wound and Claiming Your Personal Power, by Bethany Webster Of all the books in this list, this is probably the one that had the most profound impact on me from a personal healing perspective. It cracked open some wounds I wasn’t aware I still carried from my own relationship with my mother, and it helped me find ways of healing those wounds and learning how to better mother myself. (I’ll be sharing a blog post in a few weeks about a new journal practice I’ve developed as a result.)
13.Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard If you loved Braiding Sweetgrass (as I did – it’s probably my favourite book of the last five years), you will likely love this book as well. I am very fond of trees, as I’ve shared in the past, and I loved learning about the ways in which they communicate with each other in the forest and how integral they are to each other’s survival and thriving. I also enjoyed the way that the story of trees is interwoven with Simard’s personal narrative as she grew her relationship with trees.
14.Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, by Emily Najoski This is the book I wish I’d owned in my twenties. It’s also a book I’ve encouraged all three of my daughters to read. I think it has the capacity to change nearly everyone’s sex life, and it also has the capacity to help us love ourselves more and stop shaming ourselves for not being “normal”. Even if you have a great sex life, this book will teach you something new about yourself and/or your partner.
At the beginning of 2016, I made a commitment to read only books by authors who weren’t from the dominant culture. My intent was to broaden my education and stretch myself by staying away from books written by white able-bodied cisgender heterosexuals. Books have always helped me make sense of the world, and I knew that if I wanted to catch glimpses of the world through lenses that were different from mine, books would help me get there. Though my bookshelves reflect some diversity, I knew there was much more I could do.
It was harder than I expected. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of books by other voices – there are, but I had to dig harder to find them. It became clear, early on, that few publishers and booksellers are willing to bank on books by marginalized voices. They don’t invest in them as often and don’t put them front and centre in the bookstores. Walk through almost any bookstore (or at least those that I’m most familiar with, in North America), or browse through Amazon, and you’ll see fairly quickly what types of books get the most space and attention. Those voices that feel most “safe” for the average bookstore shopper will sell the most books, and I think it’s fairly safe to say that the “average bookstore shopper” is expected to be a white person with privilege.
That was one of my first realizations in this year-long quest… It is far more challenging to find a publisher and make a living from your writing if you do not fit the dominant paradigm. Other voices have to work twice as hard just to get a spot on the bookshelf. Like any other space ruled by capitalism, the bookstore centres those with privilege.
It was easiest to find books by marginalized voices in the fiction section, so I started there. Friends gave me lots of recommendation and my nightstand quickly filled with borrowed books. I started with Indigenous authors (in Canada, those are the voices that are often the most marginalized) and moved on to people of colour from the U.S., Africa, and Southeast Asia. Many of those books were gritty and challenging, and some of them brought up my white guilt. There were moments when I questioned why I was putting myself through this. Reading was starting to feel more like a chore and less like a pleasure. (Note: scroll down for a list of some of the books I read.)
Though I enjoy fiction, I don’t read nearly as much of it as I used to, and soon found myself searching for the kinds of books I lean toward – memoirs, books about the human condition, cultural exploration, leadership books, and other non-fiction. These became increasingly more difficult to find. Memoirs were fairly plentiful, once I started digging deeper than the typical bookstore shelves (and I found some great ones by writers who gave me a new perspective on what it means to be gender non-binary, what it’s like to be raised by a residential school survivor, etc.), but the hardest to find were the non-fiction books I tend to read that are relevant for my work.
I’m not sure how to define the books I most love to read, because they don’t tend to fit bookstore categorization. I read a lot of “ideas and culture” books – on leadership, spirituality, feminism, trauma, engagement, facilitation, personal development, etc. When I turned my attention to these books, my quest became the most challenging. Very few of these books are written by people who aren’t from the dominant culture.
And this was my second major realization in this quest… While we may be willing to read fiction, and sometimes memoirs by people who don’t look like us, we very rarely will accept as experts anyone who doesn’t fit the dominant paradigm. This is where the white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cis-gender voice is the most centred. Storytelling may have become a more equal playing field, but the fields of knowledge and expertise are still colonized by those with more power and privilege. And the higher you go up the “knowledge food chain” the more white women are eliminated as well.
In the Spring of 2016, just when I was looking for more of these kinds of books, something happened in my personal life that derailed my year-long commitment and made the absence of these voices even more obvious. As I’ve written before, I hit burnout. A combination of stresses in my life – divorce, single parenthood, home renovations, and the continued high demands that followed my viral blog post – left me feeling wobbly and exhausted. I stepped off social media, pulled away from some of my commitments, and sought therapy to help me get my feet back on the ground.
As is my tendency when I journey through something that shakes me up and requires a deepening of my emotional and spiritual growth, I turned to books for comfort and a way forward. At first I tried to maintain my commitment to marginalized voices, but the effort required felt like one more stressor, so I let myself off the hook. Instead, I read about body healing, generational trauma, and spirituality from some of the prominent writers in those fields – all of them from the dominant culture.
This healing period in my year is worth mentioning for a few important reasons.
1.) It highlights the lack of marginalized voices in books related to trauma/therapy/spirituality/body wisdom/etc. This begs the question: Where do people who aren’t from the dominant culture turn to find voices like them speaking to the deep healing work that they need to do? If you’ve experienced oppression, it’s very difficult to find healing from among the people who represent your oppressors.
2.) To stay on the quest for a deepening understanding of injustice, racism, etc., and to be able to continue to examine my own place within the systems that oppress people, I needed to turn inward for awhile to find my own strength and resilience. A deepening understanding of trauma, for example, helped me to heal some of my own so that I am more equipped to hold space for others who’ve faced trauma. I can enter into other people’s stories better when I have healed my own.
3.) My ability to find the voices that speak to my experience and help me heal is part of my privilege. I didn’t have to look very hard to find a therapist who looks like me and has enough education and training to support me and I didn’t have to look very hard to find suitable books that helped me understand my life experiences. My voice is well-represented and healing is relatively easy to find.
After a few months, I renewed my original commitment. I found I wasn’t quite ready for the heaviness of some of my earlier reading, so I looked for lighter reading. Comedic marginalized voices provided a nice balance and, in a surprising way, helped to normalize “the other” even more. When you’ve entered into the humour of a lived experience that is different from yours, you realize the threads that bind us together and give us common humanity. In a book on growing up Muslim in Canada, for example, I found myself chuckling at how similar some of the experiences were to my own Mennonite upbringing. Just as I felt like an outsider in my small town for the things I couldn’t do as a child (no dancing, drinking, attending community bingo nights, etc.), a young Muslim girl feels set apart for living a more restricted life.
By the end of 2016, I wasn’t ready to quit reading books by marginalized voice. Having worked through the earlier challenges of finding books that interested me, I now have a stack of books waiting for me and a long wish list of ones I want to get to eventually.
I have learned more than I can say from the reading I’ve done so far and I know I have much more to learn. At the beginning, I was learning about what it means to be Indigenous, black, brown, disabled, LGBTQ+, non-gender-binary, etc., but at some point I realized I was learning something that was equally important. By witnessing, if only for a fleeting moment, the world through their eyes, I was learning more about what it means to be a white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cis-gender woman and what privilege comes from those pieces of my identity.
When you’re a member of the dominant paradigm, you rarely have to look back at yourself in any kind of intentional self-reflection. The world is set up to support you, to centre you, to make you safe, and to make you feel normal, so you don’t have to work very hard at figuring it all out and there’s no need to challenge it.
I have the privilege of navigating the world with a kind of obliviousness in ways that others don’t, and my reading this year helped me see that more clearly. Since reading all of those books, I am more aware of, for example, how safe a bathroom might feel for a transgender person, or how accessible a space might be for a disabled person. I am also more aware of how little I’ve had to pay attention to either of those issues, and, more importantly, how I have contributed to the challenges marginalized people face and how I represent that which is unsafe for them.
Two terms came into my consciousness this year and both were made more clear by the reading I did – kyriachy and intersectionality.
From Wikipedia:
Kyriarchy, pronounced /ˈkaɪriɑːrki/, is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a single individual might be oppressed in some relationships and privileged in others. It is an intersectional extension of the idea of patriarchy beyond gender. Kyriarchy encompasses sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, economic injustice, colonialism, militarism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of dominating hierarchies in which the subordination of one person or group to another is internalized and institutionalized.
Intersectionality (or intersectional theory) is a term first coined in 1989 by American civil rights advocate and leading scholar of critical race theory, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. It is the study of what Crenshaw contends are overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that is different from the component identities. These identities that can intersect include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental disability, physical disability, mental illness, and physical illness as well as other forms of identity. These aspects of identity are not “unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather…reciprocally constructing phenomena.” The theory proposes that we think of each element or trait of a person as inextricably linked with all of the other elements in order to fully understand one’s identity.
The broad range of my reading has contributed to my understanding of what it means to be intersectional AND someone who benefits from the kyriarchy. My life is impacted not just by one aspect of who I am, but by the intersection of multiple identities. I am never “just a woman” or “just a white person”. I stand at the intersection of those identities, just as every other person stands at their own intersection. My intersection means that I am both oppressor and oppressed, both settler and sexually colonized. Their intersection means something entirely different, and I can’t presume to understand it until I ask and until I sit and listen to their stories. Embracing their stories means embracing complexity.
Individually and collectively, we need to examine our wounds, our trauma, our privilege, our oppression, our marginalization, our power, and our guilt. As we do so, we need to be conscious of how our intersectional identities might impact other people.
I started out trying to diversify my bookshelf, but what I learned instead was that I needed to work on decolonizing my bookshelf and, consequently, my life. Diversity would only get me part way there. It might give me a collection of stories and ideas about what it was like to be marginalized. But a diversity lens still allows me to centre myself and my story and do little to challenge my privilege. Decolonizing is different – it invites me to examine myself and my place in the kyriarchy, deconstruct my own narrative of domination, and challenge that which allows me to live with privilege while others can’t.
I don’t want to make it sound like it was all drudgery and hard work, though. It wasn’t. Many of the lessons of this year were beautiful ones. Adding all of these voices to my life was like adding colour to a monochrome kaleidoscope – it added depth, beauty and texture to my view of the world and allowed me to see what I’d been missing. I found common threads in the stories that made me feel more connected to the humanity of all of the people I encountered.
Though I started the year feeling like it was my duty, as a white person, to challenge myself and stretch my worldview, I can now say that it is also my pleasure and privilege. I have fallen in love with these voices and I want more and more of their stories and their wisdom. They have challenged me and they have blessed me. They have pushed me past my own fragility and helped me listen more intently to what I couldn’t hear before. My life is richer for what they continue to bring to my world.
I still have much to learn and many teachers to teach me. For now, I will continue to centre those voices that are not centred on the bookstore shelves, because it is only in doing so that I can see myself and the world more clearly. Though I wasn’t vigilant in keeping track of the books I read this year, here are the ones I remember and recommend (in no particular order:
